Having a siesta. Taking a snooze. Getting forty winks. Heading off to slumber land. Whatever you call it, sleep is important. Here are eight quotes about sleep from literature.

“Give me honorable enemies rather than ambitious ones, and I’ll sleep more easily by night.” ~ A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin

The sigh of all the seas breaking in measure round the isles soothed them; the night wrapped them; nothing broke their sleep, until, the birds beginning and the dawn weaving their thin voices in to its whiteness. ~ To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

But sleep, in the long run, proves greater than all emotions. ~ The Wendigo by Algernon Blackwood

We rose up betimes, for sleep weighs lightly on the hopeful as well as on the anxious. ~ The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann D. Wyss

The day was made for laziness, and lying on one’s back in green places, and staring at the sky till its brightness forced one to shut one’s eyes and go to sleep. ~ The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens

“O sleep, O gentle sleep, Nature’s soft nurse, how have I frightened thee, that thou no more will weigh my eyelids down, and steep my senses in forgetfulness?” ~ Henry IV, Part Two by William Shakespeare

It was the forty-fathom slumber that clears the soul and eye and heart, and sends you to breakfast ravening. ~ Captains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling

How blessed are some people, whose lives have no fears, no dreads, to whom sleep is a blessing that comes nightly, and brings nothing but sweet dreams. ~ Dracula by Bram Stoker

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